My earliest experience of reporting came as a concert reviewer for the Daily Aggie at UC Davis; my first assignment there was covering a B.B. King show. But I didn't really start as a magazine writer until 2000, thanks to a chance meeting with Tim Carvell -- these days the producer of Last Week Tonight, but back then an editor with the very '90s-sounding business magazine eCompany Now. He knew I'd written a few odd historical essays for McSweeney's. You should write something for us, he said -- and I laughed, thinking he was just being polite. Me, competent to write for a business magazine?

A month later, staring at my bills, I thought: say, I should write for a business magazine!

Since then I've written over a hundred articles, essays, and features for everyone from the Times and the Village Voice to New Scientist and the New Yorker, all listed on this site. But here are a few of my favorites:

I'd been waiting about to decade to find a good excuse to write about this bonkers 1815 Highland travel guide by Angus M'Diarmid, a Gaelic speaker with a deeply unrequited love for the English language. And lo, at last the 200th anniversary came: which goes to show that if you're willing to wait up to 99 years on any story idea, you can eventually pitch it.

The "contrarian Slate story" has become a punchline over the years, but I have a fondness for this one -- digging into early Christmas shopping uncovered a slow and monstrous transformation from a progressive labor action to a Black Friday misery. This is one of those stories that the digitization of newspapers has really made possible; a lot of the information was hiding in old advertisements, which isn't the kind of thing you could find indexed in the old days.

This story actually began in 2001 in, of all places, the UO library in Eugene, Oregon. I'd go there in the afternoons and simply read random old magazines off the shelves, which is how I first came across a 1927 review of The House Without Windows, the startling debut novel by 13 year-old child author Barbara Newhall Follett. She walked out of her Boston apartment a decade later and disappeared without a trace, and many years later her mother's estate willed her papers to Columbia University.

Reading the archives was a strange experience; they were half-sorted, really just boxes of stuff -- homework assignments, unpublished novels, personal photos, notes on a language she invented (Farksolian), letters that turned increasingly ominous over time. The resulting story generated a tremendous response; one of her nephews has since published an excellent volume compiling her letters, and Columbia even created a new and improved Finding Aid to her papers. This piece was, I think, one of the best things I've ever written -- in no small part because Barbara herself was so compelling.

This one started on a hunch. It sounds bizarre now, but I remembered cheap paperbacks from my 1970s childhood having ad inserts for cigarettes and coffee bound into them, After a gigantic public health lawsuit release of the "Tobacco Papers" internal documents to UCSF by Philip Morris and others, I thought... "What if I type in paperback as a search term into that database?" And there were the memos.

After the piece ran in the Times, I heard from a retired exec at one of the ad firms that had been involved. The tobacco companies were probably able to buy themselves even better tracking and marketing info than the publishers themselves at the time, and his biggest revelation to me was that in the late 1960s, the country's number one bookseller was... the Rexall Drugstore in Grand Central Station.

I love this article, simply because it's a history of rock music written as if I was unaware of that meaning anything other than music made with rocks -- lithophones, that is -- complete with Victorian bands going around advertising "rock concerts." The whole thing reads like a highly detailed and idiotic put-on, except... it is absolutely 100% factual. Writing something completely true and earnestly researched, but that a careless reader will assume is a hoax, is probably somewhere near the heart of my work with McSweeney's in general.

I first came across Casimir Zeglen in a 1902 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, while reading another article altogether on the same page -- and I was immediately hooked. A Chicago priest inspired by the assassination of their mayor in 1893 to invent a lightweight bulletproof vest, Father Zeglen went around the country demonstrating his invention by having an assistant shoot him in the chest onstage. Before I wrote my article, Casimir Zeglen was a "googlewhack" -- his name got exactly one hit on Google. (The patent filing for his vest, in fact.) He's much better known today, and the complete resurrection of a forgotten figure is always my favorite kind of historical piece.

Writing for the old Voice when Ed Park was an editor there was a joy, because ​he gave writers the sense that they could try pretty much anything. And on this one for the Lit Supplement -- "It's a Victorian sex-ed manual. For children. Starring a monkey." -- that's what I did.

My first extensive piece of reportage to truly come together; this was the article where I actually felt like I'd turned pro. It's an account of the rise and fall of Personics, a 1980s company that pioneered digital music downloading (!) through record-store kiosks of highly compressed music files that allowed you create personalized cassette tapes. In short: the first digital playlists. Talking with a number of the players in the business back then, I found record companies had perceived this innovation as exactly the threat that it was, and smothered the company in the crib, even though Personics had done everything legally and above-board. (Unlike, ahem, some later startups.)

Suitably enough for this tale of corporate machinations, Business 2.0 magazine was sold off to Time Warner the month after this article came out, and eventually had its own plug pulled.